1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to embedded devices, and especially to a packet forwarding method applied in an embedded device.
2. Description of Related Art
Quality of service (QoS) mechanism is the method of providing different priorities to different applications, users, data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. For example, a required bit rate, delay, jitter, packet dropping probability and/or bit error rate may be guaranteed. The QoS mechanism is often applied in embedded devices.
In the absence of network congestion, a QoS mechanism works perfectly. However, the QoS mechanism may lead to low priority packets not being forwarded when network congestion occurs. For example, referring to FIG. 5, a traditional embedded device 10a receives packets via local area network (LAN) ports 11, and classifies the packets into A, B, C types according to different priorities. The embedded device 10a will drop some or all lower priority packets, such as C packets, if there are many high priority packets causing network congestion at the embedded device 10a. Therefore, QoS mechanism is unfair for all priority packets sometimes, and accordingly is not friendly for all users.
It is therefore desirable to design an embedded device and a packet forwarding method to overcome the above mentioned problems.